Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a reception apparatus, a reception method, and recording medium.
Description of the Related Art
Nowadays, media transmission using an Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the Internet, is widely available. In the media transmission, media data, such as a moving image and a sound, captured with a camera or the like can be transmitted in real time through a network. A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications, RFC 3550, IETF (RTP) is used as such a protocol.
In addition, moving images are now in higher definition, and the demand for a greater variety of media data is on the rise as smartphones and tablets become more widely available. Accordingly, media transmission requires a high capacity network band, and development of the networking infrastructure as well as efficient use of the network bands are required.
Techniques for efficiently using the network bands include a multipath transmission technique for a higher capacity, in which a plurality of available network interfaces (I/Fs) is used in parallel. Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) (refer to Architectural Guidelines for Multipath TCP Development, RFC 6182, IETF) is an example of a protocol that supports the multipath transmission. In addition, Multipath Realtime Transport Protocol (RTP) and Concurrent Multipath Transfer using Stream Control Transmission Protocol (CMT-SCTP) are other examples of such a protocol.
In the multipath transmission, a receiving client apparatus includes a plurality of network I/Fs and temporary reception buffers corresponding to the respective network I/Fs. The receiving client apparatus uses the network I/Fs in parallel to receive packets and successively stores the received packets into the reception buffers. The receiving client apparatus then performs re-order processing to pass packet data received in the plurality of reception buffers to an upper layer module. In the re-order processing, the order of the pieces of data is switched, and the pieces of data are reconstructed into a single piece of data.
As a technique relating to a timing at which the received data is passed to the upper layer module, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-224839 discusses a technique in which decoding processing is performed at a timing at which a final video packet is received.
In the multipath transmission, there may be a situation in which a communication zone, a delay time, and so on differ among a plurality of paths. Thus, desired is a technique that allows media data to be reproduced without a delay by starting the re-order processing at an appropriate timing even in the aforementioned situation.